> Elvis had a profound impact on music and therefore society. He made black music mainstream in white society <
But Elvis wasn't the first, not by a long shot.
Haven't you ever seen those old movies from the 1930's and 1940's, with a bunch of white couples jitterbugging to the music of Count Basie and Cab Calloway?
Or have you heard about the "jazz age" of the 1920's, when just about every flapper and her beau were dancing the black-influenced Charleston to Dixieland music performed by both black bands and white bands?
> Elvis made the genesis of rock and roll acceptable to white America and then to the world. No one else was capable of making that transistion possible. <
I think you're making a vast overstatement. Bill Haley and His Comets made black-style music wildly popular among white teenagers at least a year before Elvis ever appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Elvis was a pioneer to be sure, but only one among several.
Bill Haley couldn't hold a candle to Elvis, Ask any woman who was a teenager in the early and mid fifties. Haley was a 40's swing musician who was struggling and looking for a new gimmick. Elvis broke rock and roll open. Haley could never have done that. As I said on a previous post, chronology has nothing to do with influence.
If it's just a matter of a white musician using black music influences How about Louis Moreau Gottchalk? He was hugely popular in the mid 19th century.